


The Woman in the Red Dress

by Starfire (kalypsobean)



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: F/M, Light Angst, Post-Captain America: The First Avenger, Steve Feels
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-28
Updated: 2015-09-28
Packaged: 2018-04-23 20:27:15
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,422
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4890988
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kalypsobean/pseuds/Starfire
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The first time he wakes up knowing that he's in the twenty-first century, he thinks of Peggy, and wonders what she would have thought of all this.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Woman in the Red Dress

**Author's Note:**

  * For [spookyrumba](https://archiveofourown.org/users/spookyrumba/gifts).



The first time he wakes up knowing that he's in the twenty-first century, he thinks of Peggy. He wonders what she would have thought of all this: the keypads instead of locks with little plastic cards for keys, the bright lights that mean Brooklyn is never dark, the cars that go faster than he can being driven by people younger than he was when he enlisted, the noise and how everything is so close that you can reach out and touch it even if it's miles away.

Peggy never let anything throw her, so he wouldn't know if small spaces bothered her the same way, if she felt it was too much and had to lock herself away from it all sometimes, like Steve has been in this cabin in the middle of nowhere. "Suck it up, Rogers," he can almost hear her say. He closes his eyes and tries to imagine her smiling, her eyes sparkling and the skin around them slightly crinkled, because she would be finding it amusing and wouldn't mean anything harsh by it. "You've lived through worse." 

Her voice in his head is the reason he pulls himself out of bed, the reason he does two hundred push ups, and the reason he punches the wall. It's so quiet, and though he knows it's just his mind conjuring up the last thing he held on to before he plowed into the ocean, he tries to encourage it, so he doesn't feel quite so alone.

 

The images of her in his mind aren't quite right, he knows; they gave him his compass back, with her picture still in the lid, miraculously preserved. He knows these things, how the cold meant that things didn't decay, as if there was a small area around him where he could pull things close and keep them as ageless as it seems he has become, but he still thinks it's a cruel miracle that this is what survived with him - a picture and a memory, and a compass that spins haphazardly because it was built for a time where the only direction was the way you were going, the way home. His mind is flawed, though, his mind tells him that he should use vermilion lake for her lips, and burnt ochre for her hair in the sun; and he wishes he could recall the way she looked without his pencil lines showing around her cheeks and in the hollow of her neck. She would poke fun at him for that, he knows; and she would sit still as long as he needed for her image to flow from his mind to his sketchbook, smiling slightly at something in the distance until she was called away. 

They didn't find that, and his memory is flawed; he won't dare draw her, in case he loses the picture in his head.

 

Cooking is another thing that is different; in theory he knows how to turn rations into things that feel warm on the way down and taste a little less like cardboard, but the cabin has an oven that has options beyond on and off, there's a refrigerator that not only keeps things cold, but has a thing in the door to make ice. While he can't imagine that Peggy ever became the kind of girl who stayed at home to cook and clean, he wonders what she thought when they were new, if she came home from her job and made her own meals, wondering at the way technology had evolved so that she could.

Every time he thinks of her, he feels like he didn't know her as well as he should, for a woman waiting on him for a dance. Sometimes it's a wistful feeling, the kind that comes with a few moments of quiet and fades soon after - they told him that she lived well, that she was happy, and he knows she had almost everything she ever wanted. Other times, he finds himself on the floor, gasping for breath in between tears and the hollow, empty feeling that feels like someone punched through his stomach, leaving a ragged and bleeding hole that can never quite be healed. Knowing that he did the right thing, knowing that he saved people and was remembered well enough that a secret government organisation is devoting resources and time to helping him come back to the world, doesn't help in those moments. He knows, too, that he made a promise to her and didn't keep it, and he wasn't raised that way. Even though he can still hear her voice, the way it was soft, as if she was holding back tears, as if she knew it had to be done, he knows he let her down.

Her words are the last thing he hears before he falls asleep, as if the ice crystallised those last moments and made the memory so strong he could never forget it.

 

They send Natasha to pick him up, with no warning. She's just there when he wakes up, sitting on the couch, and there's an omelette on the table, still warm. 

"Eat up," she says. "We have a mission."

"I haven't..." he starts, but she looks at him, almost like Peggy used to, but her eyes are narrowed, as if she's trying to figure him out rather than being exasperated. "Okay," he says. He's read Natasha's file, of course, what little of it they decided he should know when they asked him to join, so he's not surprised by anything other than being assigned a mission before he even agreed to sign up. She's less talkative than the others, anyway, which he's grateful for; he's not usually up for talking on the best of mornings, and certainly not the approved questions designed to test whether he's sane, supposedly without him knowing. 

"Ten minutes," she says. "And pack, you won't be coming back here." She slips out the door, and when he's wiping down his plate he hears a car start up. There's not much for him to pack - the clothes SHIELD gave him and his compass, a sketchbook he hasn't touched, a tin of pencils still in the wrapper - so he slides into the passenger seat with, by his count, twenty seconds to spare. 

"Where are we going?" he says, when the trees have given way to road and fields that seem to stretch on forever, burnt golden by the sun. 

"We'll be briefed when we get to a safe house," she says. "SHIELD can be weird with their protocols," she says, after a beat. "Better get used to it."

"Yeah," he says. He goes back to looking out the window; even with a city boy's knowledge of how the country should be, he notices things that are different, even though he hasn't seen a house or people since they left the cabin. There are machines parked in some of the fields, big green things with wheels half as high as the whole thing, and there are power lines spread out along the side of the road.

"Nothing's really the same," he says, to fill in the silence and because he can't keep it in, even though Natasha's file said she didn't tend towards social interaction. He feels like she might hear the things he doesn't say, the ones he doesn't have words for just yet. 

"You made the right call," she says, simply. Steve slumps in the seat, as if her words released all the tension in his spine; nobody's come out and said that to him before, though they've thanked him in between explaining how things are, now, and what was because of him. Hearing it is different to knowing it in his heart, where it didn't reach the surface and there was always a layer of doubt and second-guessing.

The fields pass by and the road is lined with houses, still far apart, and not modern in a way that Steve recognises; they're made of stone, or brick, and are solid and far larger than the ones he remembers in his neighbourhood, owned by the lucky few.

"I wonder what she would have thought of all of this, you know?" He instantly regrets saying it, both because it feels too personal and too big to have shared, and because Natasha pulls a hard right and parks on the side of the road, where the ground is grass and the car jerks from the change in surface.

"Why don't you ask her?" she says. "Get it out of your head." 

"What?" he says. He looks at her, one hand still on the wheel but her body turned towards him, as if she had given him almost all of her focus.

"They didn't tell you?" She makes a face, almost rolling her eyes, and Steve knows it's for his benefit, saying things without words as if the car has ears, as if someone could hear them. "Peggy Carter is still alive. She's not far from here, actually."

Steve has never been able to hide his thoughts, but he thinks his face must be saying a lot more than he is comfortable with, because Natasha starts the car again, pulls the car back onto the road and takes a left, driving them into the sun. "I can cover for you for an hour."

"Thank you," he says, because he's thinking too many things at once to sort out the words for anything else.

"Don't thank me, Rogers," she says. "If I'm working with you, I need your head in the game, and that's it." She flips a switch and there is music coming from the car speakers, clearly ending the conversation. Steve is grateful, even though he doesn't know the singer or the song; it's something to fill part of his mind while he sorts out the rest. Somehow, he'd just assumed he wouldn't be able to see her again; he'd thought that like everyone else he'd know, she was beyond his reach, surviving only as a fractured memory of another world, another time.

 

Natasha stops outside a large mansion, freshly painted white with flowers in some of the windows and a hedge for a fence. The place is so unlike Peggy that he hesitates, but Natasha glares at him until he fumbles with the handle and forces himself out of the car. He doesn't look back as she takes off, but mentally, he starts a clock that counts down from one hour. He has the impression that it would be the wisest thing to be back outside by the time she comes back, and, in some corner of his heart, he's glad that there's a timer, a reason for him to leave if things don't work out, if she hates him for abandoning her.

But he's directed to a small sunroom, away from everyone else, and he sees her, looking out the window with the same expression he's seen in the mirror, and he knows, somehow, that she forgave him long ago.

"Peggy," he says, twisting his hands together and wishing he'd had something to bring her, so that he'd have something to hold, even if he'd always thought she'd cuff him behind the head if he brought her flowers.

She turns, slightly, and he is suddenly breathless, for though she has aged much more than he has, all the things he remembered about her face are still there; he would know her anywhere from all the times he's drawn her in his mind and wished she were real. "Steve," she says. "You came back." Her voice is different, too, rougher and deeper, as if it had broken from too many tears. It feels like he rushes in to kneel by her chair, and push her hair out of her face, where it has fallen from a clip.

"Of course I came back. I promised my best girl a dance, didn't I?" 

"You did," she says. "I waited for you, you know." And he can imagine it now, her waiting at the bar, shaking her head at each man who came near, waiting for him and knowing he wouldn't be there, but hoping anyway.

"I'm here now," he says. He puts his hand over hers, where it sits on top of the blanket covering her knees. Her skin is cool and dry, but her eyes are still the same, when she looks down at him.

"That you are," she says. "I knew you would."

He forgets the timer in his mind, as he kneels by her chair, not knowing what else to say. There is a radio, somewhere, playing the same music that was in the car, and he thinks, perhaps, to ask her to dance now, but when he looks up, her eyes are closed and she is smiling, just a little.

 

He stays until he hears a shuffle behind him.

"They'll be taking her to the doctor soon," Natasha says. "We should go, before someone recognises you."

He nods, hears the sound of keys being twirled, and knows it's a subtle way of saying she'll wait in the car. He waits for her to go before he shakes Peggy's hand, waking her.

"I'll come back, Peggy," he says. "You won't be able to get rid of me."

She looks at him, her forehead creasing for a moment. "Steve," she says. "You came back."

"I did," he says. "I'll always come back." He pushes himself up, careful not to lean on her as he stretches, not that his knees are sore or his legs tired, but he's mindful, now, that they haven't been used for so long. He leans down again, though, bracing himself on the chair. She smells like soap and flowers when he's close; though he remembers her with the Army smell of dirt and oil, it suits her, as she is now. He presses his lips to her cheek, near the corner of her mouth, close enough that he could imagine her turning her head to meet him, perhaps, if things were different.

"I'll come back," he says, and slips into the shadows as an orderly appears in the door.

 

Natasha pulls out onto the road as soon as he's closed the door. They don't talk as the houses blend into apartment buildings and suddenly they're in the city, and a place Steve recognises, but he nods at her before they go in, and she smiles.

 

Steve leaves the compass in his duffel, or his pocket, but he never goes anywhere without it.


End file.
